On January 8, two curious stories made the rounds of the national media. The first came out of New York City where reports surfaced that sometime in the early morning, commuters had detected a strong gas-like smell that wafted through Manhattan and soon overtook neighboring areas. The smell was alarming for a city continuously tense with the possibility of terrorist action. Schools and buildings were evacuated as a precautionary measure and workers from a nearby gas plant were sent to test for the mysterious cause of the odor. As the day and story developed, officials were still unclear of the nature of the source but could assure the public that whatever the substance was, it was not toxic. “It may just be an unpleasant smell,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. Meanwhile, in Austin, Texas, part of downtown was being closed after 63 birds were found dead. Ten blocks were temporarily shut down as workers in yellow haz-mat suits tested for contaminants in an area near the state capitol and the governor’s mansion. Authorities finally gave the “all clear” in the afternoon.
“It’s not necessarily what people would deem cutting-edge technology, says Avir’s Keith Holland, middle, of the low-cost, easy-to-use sensor. Laufer, right, and Avir’s Roger Reynolds, work out of a small lab near O-Hill. |
“Both are very interesting events from our point of view,” says Gabriel Laufer, a University of Virginia professor for 20 years and the founder and president of Avir (www.avirsensors.com), a company that has developed a detection sensor for such a predicament. “Had there been an actual toxic release the level of casualties would have increased because people were walking out rather than staying indoors.”
In Austin, as in Manhattan, employees spilled out into the streets in an effort to flee the suspected substance. As Laufer sees it, he has created a machine that would prevent the panic that surrounds incidents like those of January 8. “Think of the cost of all the evacuations that day,” he says, always the pragmatist. “Nothing happened and it was already expensive.”
Welcome to America circa 2007, a time of terrorism both imagined and real, when any odd occurrence is immediately suspected as the result of perfidy. While Charlottesville has thus far avoided any episode, it has played a part in the battle against the suspected enemy. As in any time of war and the corresponding military awakening it inspires, it pays to be in the defense business and in that sense Charlottesville has struck a vein of gold. In 2005 alone, some 37 area entities accrued more than $25 million in Department of Defense contracts (This number includes UVA but not the National Intelligence Center or Sperry Marine or the subcontractors that work for them) for a wide array of services. Puff, Inc., for example, installs foam roofing, insulation and waterproofing systems for various structures on the East Coast, some of them military. Or there is the retired psychiatrist who could tell me only that he treats soldiers who have just returned from war but could not divulge where he performs the therapy. Among this predictable crowd is Avir, as unlikely a candidate as exists for defense funding yet one of Charlottesville’s largest recipients.
There in the Aerospace Research Laboratory, situated in a drab one-storey building on the side of Observatory Hill, Laufer and a team of three researchers—Keith Holland, Roger Reynolds, Robert Zehr—work tirelessly to perfect their creation, a remote optical sensor that reads the infrared emission of airborne chemicals. In one lab, a silver airtight duct girds the ceiling. Inside, a sensor sits, poised to detect chemicals that have been injected into the secure environment. While most of the chemicals used are benign, Laufer and his staff did fear for their well-being once when they backed in a truck to pipe in diesel fumes. “We filled the whole room with it,” says Laufer, laughing at the memory. “We almost died here.” The experiment—to see if the sensor could read a specific chemical even with the presence of a high amount of diesel exhaust—was a success even as the scientists choked on fumes.
Down the hall in another lab, a prototype of the sensor rests on a tripod. The size of a small shoebox and encased in purple steel casing, it is pointed in the direction of another purple box which contains the heat source that the sensor depends upon to increase the sensitivity of the chemicals’ infrared. “The sensor has learned to recognize about 25 chemicals,” says Laufer. He is trying to explain to me, an ordinary mortal, how the contraption works and points to a small silver disc inside. “The only thing in this box that really matters is this round block,” he says. I stare at it. “There are 16 little holes, each hole has an infrared detector, and radiation/infrared goes through an opening, and a spinning mirror projects radiation into one detector at a time. Each one is sensitive to a different part of the infrared spectrum.” O.K., I think I understand it…barely. Clearly, the man is operating on a level of intellect my mind rarely dares approach.
“He’s one of the smartest people in the department or even the school,” Hossein Haj-Hariri gushes. As a professor and current chair of the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, he has known Laufer for almost 20 years. “He’s just very brilliant!”
Brilliant: family, friends and colleagues all called upon the adjective to describe the inventor. One need not look much further than his resume for proof. First there are the four degrees, all earned in the heady areas of mechanical and aerospace engineering. In addition to the nearly 50 published articles, Laufer has written three books, including a textbook, the plainly stated Introduction to Optics and Lasers in Engineering. As it was printed in 1996, I ask the professor if he has plans to update it. He tells me no and then explains. “Publishing a book is mainly an exercise in ego,” Laufer says, breaking into a smile. “I’ve already had my ego stroked.”
Still, there are a lot of intelligent people at UVA, but very few have a company, let alone one like Avir. For that, Laufer drew on a lifelong penchant for practicality. While the ability to break seemingly complicated elements down into simple terms is a trait found throughout academia, it rarely translates to something practical (beyond a textbook). According to his wife, Liora, it is a talent “Gaby” (rhymes with “Abbie”) has always possessed. She met the professor when she was only 16 and he 20, and a student at Technion. Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1948, Gaby and his parents moved the following year to the newly independent state of Israel. Two decades later, the student spied his future wife dancing with a friend and asked to trade partners. “He saw his opportunity and took it on the spot,” remembers Liora.
“And we switched and that was the end of it.”
The next few years were a blur of activity as Gaby made his way through Technion University in Israel. In 1973, the newly married couple faced the travails of Israeli life during the Yom Kippur War. Six months into their union the emerging scientist was drafted to serve in the artillery, as the leader of a surveyor’s unit. In 1975, the couple left for America so Gaby could attend Princeton in New Jersey. That same year, their first son was born. As the boy grew and the couple added a daughter and another son, Liora noticed her husband employ his success at simplification on his children. “When they needed to do something, he always had a way to bring a side that you would never think of,” she recalls. “If the kids came up with a problem he was able to see through all the dust, and was able to pinpoint and say, ‘This is the problem.’ And then as soon as he pointed it out, you’d say, ‘Oh, that’s so simple.’”
I saw this ability firsthand of course as Laufer took me through the science of his creation. “It depends on naturally occurring infra-red deviation,” he said of the sensor. “Warm bodies emit continuously. Night vision reads infrared emission,” giving me an example of a widely known use of the technology. “The difficulty is that different objects emit radiation differently. You and I emit differently than the wall. There is radiation coming from the wall and we could detect it by facing the wall, but we need to account for the fact that it’s different.”
To counter this dilemma, Laufer and his team created a two-piece, open-path system. To demonstrate Laufer takes me into the hall. At one end is a heating source, what Laufer refers to as a “glorified headlight,” that is essentially made of a small heating coil that operates much like those in an oven. One-hundred feet away, we stand under the purple box that reads the infrared given off by chemicals, their sensitivity increased by the heat. “A stationary sensor is faster to respond to chemicals at lower concentrations than a handheld would be,” says Keith Holland, Avir’s 28-year-old vice president for research and development. A transfer from James Madison University, Holland first worked with Laufer on a project that was a partnership among UVA, Litton PRC, and NASA. The brainchild of Laufer, the program culminated in the successful launch of a student-designed payload aboard an Orion sounding rocket at NASA’s Wallops Island, Virginia, facility. While working on the project, Holland switched over to do preliminary research on the first generation of Avir’s Totally Optical Vapor Analyzer (TOVA).
By that point Avir had received the first of its public grants when after four years of failed proposals and frustration, the Virginia Center for Innovative Technology awarded $90,000 in State money. July 1, 2001, was a seminal moment. Private investors soon fell in and federal money was not far behind. In 2003, the Pentagon, specifically the Office of Naval Research, awarded Avir a service contract for $69,971, the first in a series of defense contracts that eventually totaled over $3 million. “They wanted us to develop a sensor that would fly suspended from a UAV,” says Laufer. “With the idea that it glides across an altitude and looks down and detects anything that happens down there.” The next year, the newly formed Department of Homeland Security recognized the potential of Avir’s sensor for domestic security and kicked in an additional $1.1 million. One of the initial grants was for a sensor that would be placed near air ducts. By last October, when the defense contract finally ran out, Laufer and his team had developed functional prototypes of the remote sensor and are busy working on a handheld version. As 2006 approached its close, marketers were hired to identify potential consumers, and negotiations with manufacturers initiated.
“Gaby is very effective,” says one investor. “When he works on a problem, it gets done." |
To get Avir where it is, Laufer had to fall back on the prescient lessons his wife, Liora, witnessed him instruct his children in. “Now I can see him doing the same thing with the company,” she says. Indeed, Avir seems to be the culmination of a lifelong dedication to this ideal, both in the way the TOVA sensor functions and the manner in which the company operates. “Gaby is very effective,” Robert Capon, Avir’s initial private investor and one of its directors, says. “When he works on a problem, it gets done.”
This type of attention was put to the functionality of the machine. “It’s not necessarily what people would deem cutting- edge technology,” admits Holland. Almost from the beginning, Laufer knew that what he wanted to create and what the market demanded was a low-cost, easy-to-use sensor. Narrowing the focus allowed Avir to avoid the dilemmas posed by most of the sensors currently available (well over 100 in number). Many of them cost thousands over the less than $10,000 price tag Avir is offering theirs at, while the more inexpensive competition, often handheld versions, typically suffers from several liabilities. First, a handheld sensor has to be right in the presence of the offending chemical because the machine operates by sampling air. “As you would imagine, if it’s not where the chemical is, it’s not going to detect it,” says Laufer. “To protect a large space like a subway station, it’s going to have a limited effect.”
Since they must sample air, the handheld sensors are also contaminated quickly. Finally, they’re fairly slow for response, taking up to a minute to diagnose the particular agent. By employing infrared technology, Avir’s sensor is able to read chemicals within one second.
From a business perspective, Avir’s model was complicated. Formed from technology developed at UVA, Avir essentially treats UVA as a subcontractor. Of Avir’s six employees, three are hired by UVA but paid through funds awarded to Avir. Laufer is technically one of Avir’s employees, as are two subcontractors, one based in Crozet, the other in Yorktown. The University is also a business partner, and as the technology for the sensor was originally conceived at UVA, the University owns the intellectual property. Accordingly, it stands to make significant royalties once the sensor enters the production phase. While UVA has only begun to encourage such spin-offs, other universities have long sponsored such activity. Cisco Systems and Hewlett Packard are but two companies that originally started at Stanford, which still makes a substantial amount from both.
“You realize I’m sitting on both sides of the fence,” Laufer says. As an employee of both UVA and Avir, Laufer immediately recognized the potential for a conflict of interest. “And you need to do it such that it’s legal and fair. And it needs to be fair to both sides, to the company because a company has investors, to UVA because they are hosting us. It’s very difficult.”
His department chair, Haj-Hariri, seconds Laufer. “If he wanted to not be careful it would be very difficult to track the money and he could basically keep the money for himself while using the resources of the University,” he says. To avoid such a scenario, Laufer carefully worked with the Provost’s Office and regularly reports to an oversight committee. Each contract awarded has to be approved by the Board of Visitors and signed off on by President John Casteen. “I think we did find a way so that UVA and Avir both feel comfortable with it and will both become successful,” Laufer adds. “That’s how good businesses work.”
With several prototypes finished and functioning, Avir seems to be in a lucrative position. “This is a very large market,” says Capon. “You can just imagine the number of entities that need the sensor, and if they need the sensor they would need a number of them.” He invoked possible customers, calling attention to subway systems, government buildings, and chemical plants. Still, Capon, like many involved in the project, is also quick to stress the sensor’s potential benefit to the public. “If we can help prevent injury or loss of life of even one person, it’s really worthwhile what we’re doing,” Holland echoes. “If we happen to make money along the way—as Dr. Laufer says—we won’t complain about that either.”
